The Rousing of Ogma: Developing Functional Methodologies for the Production of Multimodal Scholarship

Abstract

In The Rousing of Ogma: Developing Functional Methodologies for the Production of Multimodal Scholarship, Nicholas Alexander Brown interrogates the reception of non-linguistic scholarly forms within the context of rhetoric and composition and argues that scholars need to develop methodologies responsive to the affordances of multimodal scholarship. Brown first demonstrates that our widely accepted models of media consumption and production are insufficient and proposes the collapse of form and content into formcontent in order to account better for the successive layering of interactions that come to inform our understanding of mediated artifacts. Next, he examines the extant manifestations of comics-as-scholarship in order to taxonomize the phenomenon and to suggest that comics-as-scholarship using an unnamed and undepicted narrator commenting from outside of the text through aestheticized language circumvents many of the problems that he identifies as limiting current comics-as-scholarship practice. He then traces the reception of multimodal scholarship more generally within the context of rhetoric and composition, noting that the calls for greater multimodality remain largely unheeded and argues that rhetoric and composition needs to determine the position of multimodality within the discipline. Finally, Brown demonstrate a comics-as-scholarship methodology tied to multimodal rhetorical theory and the historic rhetorical practices of the ancient Irish that eschews language and questions the centrality of discourse in academic meaning-making practices.